THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATIONNovember 8, 2002 -- vol. 49, .docx

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
November 8, 2002 -- vol. 49, no. 11, p. B7
The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation
By Alfie Kohn
Grade inflation got started ... in the late '60s and early '70s....
The grades that faculty members now give ... deserve to be a
scandal.
--Professor Harvey Mansfield, Harvard University, 2001
Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily -- Grade A for
work of no very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above
mediocrity. ... One of the chief obstacles to raising the
standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere
students gain passable grades by sham work.
--Report of the Committee on Raising the Standard, Harvard
University, 1894
Complaints about grade inflation have been around for a very
long time. Every so often a fresh flurry of publicity pushes the
issue to the foreground again, the latest example being a series
of articles in The Boston Globe last year that disclosed -- in a
tone normally reserved for the discovery of entrenched
corruption in state government -- that a lot of students at
Harvard were receiving A's and being graduated with honors.
The fact that people were offering the same complaints more
than a century ago puts the latest bout of harrumphing in

perspective, not unlike those quotations about the disgraceful
values of the younger generation that turn out to be hundreds of
years old. The long history of indignation also pretty well
derails any attempts to place the blame for higher grades on a
residue of bleeding-heart liberal professors hired in the '60s.
(Unless, of course, there was a similar countercultural
phenomenon in the 1860s.)
Yet on campuses across America today, academe's usual
requirements for supporting data and reasoned analysis have
been suspended for some reason where this issue is concerned.
It is largely accepted on faith that grade inflation -- an upward
shift in students' grade-point averages without a similar rise in
achievement -- exists, and that it is a bad thing. Meanwhile, the
truly substantive issues surrounding grades and motivation have
been obscured or ignored.
The fact is that it is hard to substantiate even the simple claim
that grades have been rising. Depending on the time period
we're talking about, that claim may well be false. In their book
When Hope and Fear Collide (Jossey-Bass, 1998), Arthur
Levine and Jeanette Cureton tell us that more undergraduates in
1993 reported receiving A's (and fewer reported receiving
grades of C or below) compared with their counterparts in 1969
and 1976 surveys. Unfortunately, self-reports are notoriously
unreliable, and the numbers become even more dubious when
only a self-selected, and possibly unrepresentative, segment
bothers to return the questionnaires. (One out of three failed to
do so in 1993; no information is offered about the return rates
in the earlier surveys.)
To get a more accurate picture of whether grades have changed
over the years, one needs to look at official student transcripts.
Clifford Adelman, a senior research analyst with the U.S.
Department of Education, did just that, reviewing transcripts
from more than 3,000 institutions and reporting his results in

1995. His finding: "Contrary to the widespread lamentations,
grades actually declined slightly in the last two decades."
Moreover, a report released just this year by the National Center
for Education Statistics revealed that fully 33.5 percent of
American undergraduates had a grade-point average of C or
below in 1999-2000, a number that ought to quiet "all the furor
over grade inflation," according to a spokesperson for the
Association of American Colleges and Universities. (A review
of other research suggests a comparable lack of support for
claims of grade inflation at the high-school level.)
[Addendum 2004: A subsequent analysis by Adelman, which
reviewed college transcripts from students who were graduated
from high school in 1972, 1982, and 1992, confirmed that there
was no significant or linear increase in average grades over that
period. The average GPA for those three cohorts was 2.70, 2.66,
and 2.74, respectively. The proportion of A's and B's received
by students: 58.5 percent in the '70s, 58.9 percent in the '80s,
and 58.0 percent in the '90s. Even when Adelman looked at
"highly selective" institutions, he again found very little change
in average GPA over the decades.]
However, even where grades are higher now as compared with
then, that does not constitute proof that they are inflated. The
burden rests with critics to demonstrate that those higher grades
are undeserved, and one can cite any number of alternative
explanations. Maybe students are turning in better assignments.
Maybe instructors used to be too stingy with their marks and
have become more reasonable. Maybe the concept of assessment
itself has evolved, so that today it is more a means for allowing
students to demonstrate what they know rather than for sorting
them or "catching them out." (The real question, then, is why
we spent so many years trying to make good students look bad.)
Maybe students aren't forced to take as many courses outside
their primary areas of interest in which they didn't fare as well.
Maybe struggling students are now able to withdraw from a

course before a poor grade appears on their transcripts. (Say
what you will about that practice, it challenges the hypothesis
that the grades students receive in the courses they complete are
inflated.)
The bottom line: No one has ever demonstrated that students
today get A's for the same work that used to receive B's or C's.
We simply do not have the data to support such a claim.
Consider the most recent, determined effort by a serious source
to prove that grades are inflated: "Evaluation and the Academy:
Are We Doing the Right Thing?" a report released this year by
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Its senior author
is Henry Rosovsky, formerly Harvard's dean of the faculty. The
first argument offered in support of the proposition that
students couldn't possibly deserve higher grades is that SAT
scores have dropped during the same period that grades are
supposed to have risen. But this is a patently inapt comparison,
if only because the SAT is deeply flawed. It has never been
much good even at predicting grades during the freshman year
in college, to say nothing of more important academic
outcomes. A four-year analysis of almost 78,000 University of
California students, published last year by the UC president's
office, found that the test predicted only 13.3 percent of
variation in freshman grades, a figure roughly consistent with
hundreds of previous studies. (I outlined numerous other
problems with the test in "Two Cheers for an End to the
SAT,"The Chronicle, March 9, 2001.)
Even if one believes that the SAT is a valid and valuable exam,
however, the claim that scores are dropping is a poor basis for
the assertion that grades are too high. First, it is difficult to
argue that a standardized test taken in high school and grades
for college course work are measuring the same thing. Second,
changes in aggregate SAT scores mostly reflect the proportion
of the eligible population that has chosen to take the test. The

American Academy's report states that average SAT scores
dropped slightly from 1969 to 1993. But over that period, the
pool of test takers grew from about one-third to more than two-
fifths of high-school graduates -- an addition of more than
200,000 students.
Third, a decline in overall SAT scores is hardly the right
benchmark against which to measure the grades earned at
Harvard or other elite institutions. Every bit of evidence I could
find -- including a review of the SAT scores of entering
students at Harvard over the past two decades, at the nation's
most selective colleges over three and even four decades, and at
all private colleges since 1985 -- uniformly confirms a virtually
linear rise in both verbal and math scores, even after correcting
for the renorming of the test in the mid-1990s. To cite just one
example, the latest edition of "Trends in College Admissions"
reports that the average verbal-SAT score of students enrolled
in all private colleges rose from 543 in 1985 to 558 in 1999.
Thus, those who regard SAT results as a basis for comparison
should expect to see higher grades now rather than assume that
they are inflated.
The other two arguments made by the authors of the American
Academy's report rely on a similar sleight of hand. They note
that more college students are now forced to take remedial
courses, but offer no reason to think that this is especially true
of the relevant student population -- namely, those at the most
selective colleges who are now receiving A's instead of B's.
[Addendum 2004: Adelman's newer data challenge the premise
that there has been any increase. In fact, "the proportion of all
students who took at least one remedial course [in college]
dropped from 51 percent in the [high school] class of 1982 to 42
percent in the class of 1992."]
Finally, they report that more states are adding high-school
graduation tests and even standardized exams for admission to

public universities. Yet that trend can be explained by political
factors and offers no evidence of an objective decline in
students' proficiency. For instance, scores on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress, known as "the nation's
report card" on elementary and secondary schooling, have
shown very little change over the past couple of decades, and
most of the change that has occurred has been for the better. As
David Berliner and Bruce Biddle put it in their tellingly titled
book The Manufactured Crisis (Addison-Wesley, 1995), the
data demonstrate that "today's students are at least as well
informed as students in previous generations." The latest round
of public-school bashing -- and concomitant reliance on high-
stakes testing -- began with the Reagan administration's "Nation
at Risk" report, featuring claims now widely viewed by
researchers as exaggerated and misleading.
*
Beyond the absence of good evidence, the debate over grade
inflation brings up knotty epistemological problems. To say that
grades are not merely rising but inflated -- and that they are
consequently "less accurate" now, as the American Academy's
report puts it -- is to postulate the existence of an objectively
correct evaluation of what a student (or an essay) deserves, the
true grade that ought to be uncovered and honestly reported. It
would be an understatement to say that this reflects a simplistic
and outdated view of knowledge and of learning.
In fact, what is most remarkable is how rarely learning even
figures into the discussion. The dominant disciplinary
sensibility in commentaries on this topic is not that of education
-- an exploration of pedagogy or assessment -- but rather of
economics. That is clear from the very term "grade inflation,"
which is, of course, just a metaphor. Our understanding is
necessarily limited if we confine ourselves to the vocabulary of
inputs and outputs, incentives, resource distribution, and
compensation.

Suppose, for the sake of the argument, we assumed the very
worst -- not only that students are getting better grades than did
their counterparts of an earlier generation, but that the grades
are too high. What does that mean, and why does it upset some
people so?
To understand grade inflation in its proper context, we must
acknowledge a truth that is rarely named: The crusade against it
is led by conservative individuals and organizations who regard
it as analogous -- or even related -- to such favorite whipping
boys as multicultural education, the alleged radicalism of
academe, "political correctness" (a label that permits the
denigration of anything one doesn't like without having to offer
a reasoned objection), and too much concern about students'
self-esteem. Mainstream media outlets and college
administrators have allowed themselves to be put on the
defensive by accusations about grade inflation, as can be
witnessed when deans at Harvard plead nolo contendere and
dutifully tighten their grading policies.
What are the critics assuming about the nature of students'
motivation to learn, about the purpose of evaluation and of
education itself? (It is surely revealing when someone reserves
time and energy to complain bitterly about how many students
are getting A's -- as opposed to expressing concern about, say,
how many students have been trained to think that the point of
going to school is to get A's.)
"In a healthy university, it would not be necessary to say what
is wrong with grade inflation," Harvey Mansfield asserted in an
opinion article last year (The Chronicle, April 6, 2001). That, to
put it gently, is a novel view of health. It seems reasonable to
expect those making an argument to be prepared to defend it,
and also valuable to bring their hidden premises to light. Here
are the assumptions that seem to underlie the grave warnings

about grade inflation:
The professor's job is to sort students for employers or graduate
schools. Some are disturbed by grade inflation -- or, more
accurately, grade compression -- because it then becomes harder
to spread out students on a continuum, ranking them against one
another for the benefit of postcollege constituencies. One
professor asks, by way of analogy, "Why would anyone
subscribe to Consumers Digest if every blender were rated a
'best buy'?"
But how appropriate is such a marketplace analogy? Is the
professor's job to rate students like blenders for the convenience
of corporations, or is it to offer feedback that will help students
learn more skillfully and enthusiastically? (Notice, moreover,
that even consumer magazines don't grade on a curve. They
report the happy news if it turns out that every blender meets a
reasonable set of performance criteria.)
Furthermore, the student-as-appliance approach assumes that
grades provide useful information to those postcollege
constituencies. Yet growing evidence -- most recently in the
fields of medicine and law, as cited in publications like The
Journal of the American Medical Association and the American
Educational Research Journal -- suggests that grades and test
scores do not in fact predict career success, or much of anything
beyond subsequent grades and test scores.
Students should be set against one another in a race for
artificially scarce rewards. "The essence of grading is
exclusiveness," Mansfield said in one interview. Students
"should have to compete with each other," he said in another.
In other words, even when no graduate-school admissions
committee pushes for students to be sorted, they ought to be
sorted anyway, with grades reflecting relative standing rather

than absolute accomplishment. In effect, this means that the
game should be rigged so that no matter how well students do,
only a few can get A's. The question guiding evaluation in such
a classroom is not "How well are they learning?" but "Who's
beating whom?" The ultimate purpose of good colleges, this
view holds, is not to maximize success, but to ensure that there
will always be losers.
A bell curve may sometimes -- but only sometimes -- describe
the range of knowledge in a roomful of students at the
beginning of a course. When it's over, though, any responsible
educator hopes that the results would skew drastically to the
right, meaning that most students learned what they hadn't
known before. Thus, in their important study, Making Sense of
College Grades (Jossey-Bass, 1986), Ohmer Milton, Howard
Pollio, and James Eison write, "It is not a symbol of rigor to
have grades fall into a 'normal' distribution; rather, it is a
symbol of failure -- failure to teach well, failure to test well,
and failure to have any influence at all on the intellectual lives
of students." Making sure that students are continually re-
sorted, with excellence turned into an artificially scarce
commodity, is almost perverse.
What does relative success signal about student performance in
any case? The number of peers that a student has bested tells us
little about how much she knows and is able to do. Moreover,
such grading policies may create a competitive climate that is
counterproductive for winners and losers alike, to the extent
that it discourages a free exchange of ideas and a sense of
community that's conducive to exploration.
Harder is better (or Higher grades mean lower standards).
Compounding the tendency to confuse excellence with victory is
a tendency to confuse quality with difficulty -- as evidenced in
the accountability fad that has elementary and secondary
education in its grip just now, with relentless talk of "rigor" and

"raising the bar." The same confusion shows up in higher
education when professors pride themselves not on the
intellectual depth and value of their classes but merely on how
much reading they assign, how hard their tests are, how rarely
they award good grades, and so on. "You're going to have to
work in here!" they announce, with more than a hint of
machismo and self-congratulation.
Some people might defend that posture on the grounds that
students will perform better if A's are harder to come by. In
fact, the evidence on this question is decidedly mixed. Stringent
grading sometimes has been shown to boost short-term retention
as measured by multiple-choice exams -- never to improve
understanding or promote interest in learning. The most recent
analysis, released in 2000 by Julian R. Betts and Jeff Grogger,
professors of economics at the University of California at San
Diego and at Los Angeles, respectively, found that tougher
grading was initially correlated with higher test scores. But the
long-term effects were negligible -- with the exception of
minority students, for whom the effects were negative.
It appears that something more than an empirical hypothesis is
behind the "harder is better" credo, particularly when it is set up
as a painfully false dichotomy: Those easy-grading professors
are too lazy to care, or too worried about how students will
evaluate them, or overly concerned about their students' self-
esteem, whereas we are the last defenders of what used to
matter in the good old days. High standards! Intellectual
honesty! No free lunch!
The American Academy's report laments an absence of "candor"
about this issue. Let us be candid, then. Those who grumble
about undeserved grades sometimes exude a cranky impatience
with -- or even contempt for -- the late adolescents and young
adults who sit in their classrooms. Many people teaching in
higher education, after all, see themselves primarily as

researchers and regard teaching as an occupational hazard,
something they're not very good at, were never trained for, and
would rather avoid. It would be interesting to examine the
correlation between one's view of teaching (or of students) and
the intensity of one's feelings about grade inflation. Someone
also might want to examine the personality profiles of those
who become infuriated over the possibility that someone,
somewhere, got an A without having earned it.
Grades motivate. With the exception of orthodox behaviorists,
psychologists have come to realize that people can exhibit
qualitatively different kinds of motivation: intrinsic, in which
the task itself is seen as valuable, and extrinsic, in which the
task is just a means to the end of gaining a reward or escaping a
punishment. The two are not only distinct but often inversely
related. Scores of studies have demonstrated, for example, that
the more people are rewarded, the more they come to lose
interest in whatever had to be done in order to get the reward.
(That conclusion is essentially reaffirmed by the latest major
meta-analysis on the topic: a review of 128 studies, published in
1999 by Edward L. Deci, Richard Koestner, and Richard Ryan.)
Those unfamiliar with that basic distinction, let alone the
supporting research, may be forgiven for pondering how to
"motivate" students, then concluding that grades are often a
good way of doing so, and consequently worrying about the
impact of inflated grades. But the reality is that it doesn't matter
how motivated students are; what matters is how students are
motivated. A focus on grades creates, or at least perpetuates, an
extrinsic orientation that is likely to undermine the love of
learning we are presumably seeking to promote.
Three robust findings emerge from the empirical literature on
the subject: Students who are given grades, or for whom grades
are made particularly salient, tend to display less interest in
what they are doing, fare worse on meaningful measures of

learning, and avoid more challenging tasks when given the
opportunity -- as compared with those in a nongraded
comparison group. College instructors cannot help noticing, and
presumably being disturbed by, such consequences, but they
may lapse into blaming students ("grade grubbers") rather than
understanding the systemic sources of the problem. A focus on
whether too many students are getting A's suggests a tacit
endorsement of grades that predictably produces just such a
mind-set in students.
These fundamental questions are almost completely absent from
discussions of grade inflation. The American Academy's report
takes exactly one sentence -- with no citations -- to dismiss the
argument that "lowering the anxiety over grades leads to better
learning," ignoring the fact that much more is involved than
anxiety. It is a matter of why a student learns, not only how
much stress he feels. Nor is the point just that low grades hurt
some students' feelings, but that grades, per se, hurt all students'
engagement with learning. The meaningful contrast is not
between an A and a B or C, but between an extrinsic and an
intrinsic focus.
Precisely because that is true, a reconsideration of grade
inflation leads us to explore alternatives to our (often
unreflective) use of grades. Narrative comments and other ways
by which faculty members can communicate their evaluations
can be far more informative than letter or number grades, and
much less destructive. Indeed, some colleges -- for example,
Hampshire, Evergreen State, Alverno, and New College of
Florida -- have eliminated grades entirely, as a critical step
toward raising intellectual standards. Even the American
Academy's report acknowledges that "relatively undifferentiated
course grading has been a traditional practice in many graduate
schools for a very long time." Has that policy produced lower
quality teaching and learning? Quite the contrary: Many people
say they didn't begin to explore ideas deeply and passionately

until graduate school began and the importance of grades
diminished significantly.
If the continued use of grades rests on nothing more than
tradition ("We've always done it that way"), a faulty
understanding of motivation, or excessive deference to
graduate-school admissions committees, then it may be time to
balance those factors against the demonstrated harms of getting
students to chase A's. Ohmer Milton and his colleagues
discovered -- and others have confirmed -- that a "grade
orientation" and a "learning orientation" on the part of students
tend to be inversely related. That raises the disturbing
possibility that some colleges are institutions of higher learning
in name only, because the paramount question for students is
not "What does this mean?" but "Do we have to know this?"
A grade-oriented student body is an invitation for the
administration and faculty to ask hard questions: What
unexamined assumptions keep traditional grading in place?
What forms of assessment might be less destructive? How can
professors minimize the salience of grades in their classrooms,
so long as grades must still be given? And: If the artificial
inducement of grades disappeared, what sort of teaching
strategies might elicit authentic interest in a course?
To engage in this sort of inquiry, to observe real classrooms,
and to review the relevant research is to arrive at one overriding
conclusion: The real threat to excellence isn't grade inflation at
all; it's grades.
_______________________________________
Click here for a list of sources used in this article.
Copyright © 2002 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be
downloaded, reproduced, and distributed without permission as

long as each copy includes this notice along with citation
information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally
appeared, date of publication, and author's name). Permission
must be obtained in order to reprint this article in a published
work or in order to offer it for sale in any form. Please write to
the address indicated on the Contact page at www.alfiekohn.org.
gather all of your information, plan the direction of your essay,
and organize your ideas by developing a 1-page thesis statement
and outline for your essay.
Only one source is required, and I will agree that this essay is
probably the most difficult/confusing of them all. Please
remember I am very lenient with this first essay:-) Think about
it like this-- read one of the online articles given in the Reading
and Study folder. Hopefully, one of those will trigger some
past educational experience-- this could either support what the
article is saying or even go against it-- for example, if you
chose the article on chores for children, you may disagree that
chores are bad for children; thus, your thesis/argument would be
something regarding that and your narrative portion would need
to support your argument. I prefer that only your narrative
portion(maybe several paragraphs at the most) would be the
only part that is in first person.
PRINCIPAL LEADERSHIP
March 2003
What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated?
By Alfie Kohn
No one should offer pronouncements about what it means to be
well-educated without meeting my ex-wife. When I met her, she
was at Harvard, putting the finishing touches on her doctoral

dissertation in anthropology. A year later, having spent her
entire life in school, she decided to do the only logical thing . .
. and apply to medical school. Today she is a practicing
physician -- and an excellent one at that, judging by feedback
from her patients and colleagues.
She will, however, freeze up if you ask her what 8 times 7 is,
because she never learned the multiplication table. And forget
about grammar (“Me and him went over her house today” is
fairly typical) or literature (“Who’s Faulkner?”). After a dozen
years, I continue to be impressed on a regular basis by the
agility of her mind as well as by how much she doesn’t know.
So what do you make of this paradox? Is she a walking
indictment of the system that let her get so far -- 29 years of
schooling, not counting medical residency -- without acquiring
the basics of English and math? Or does she offer an invitation
to rethink what it means to be well-educated since what she
lacks hasn’t prevented her from being a deep-thinking, high-
functioning, multiply credentialed, professionally successful
individual?
Of course, if those features describe what it means to be well-
educated, then there is no dilemma to be resolved. She fits the
bill. The problem arises only if your definition includes a list of
facts and skills that one must have but that she lacks. In that
case, though, my wife is not alone. Thanks to the internet,
which allows writers and researchers to circulate rough drafts of
their manuscripts, I’ve come to realize just how many truly
brilliant people cannot spell or punctuate. Their insights and
discoveries may be changing the shape of their respective
fields, but they can’t use an apostrophe correctly to save their
lives.
Or what about me (he suddenly inquired, relinquishing his
comfortable perch from which issue all those judgments of other

people)? I could embarrass myself pretty quickly by listing the
number of classic works of literature I’ve never read. And I can
multiply reasonably well, but everything mathematical I was
taught after first-year algebra (and even some of that) is
completely gone. How well-educated am I?
*
The issue is sufficiently complex that questions are easier to
formulate than answers. So let’s at least be sure we’re asking
the right questions and framing them well.
1. The Point of Schooling: Rather than attempting to define
what it means to be well-educated, should we instead be asking
about the purposes of education? The latter formulation invites
us to look beyond academic goals. For example, Nel Noddings,
professor emerita at Stanford University, urges us to reject “the
deadly notion that the schools’ first priority should be
intellectual development” and contends that “the main aim of
education should be to produce competent, caring, loving, and
lovable people.” Alternatively, we might wade into the dispute
between those who see education as a means to creating or
sustaining a democratic society and those who believe its
primary role is economic, amounting to an “investment” in
future workers and, ultimately, corporate profits. In short,
perhaps the question “How do we know if education has been
successful?” shouldn’t be posed until we have asked what it’s
supposed to be successful at.
2. Evaluating People vs. Their Education: Does the phrase well-
educated refer to a quality of the schooling you received, or to
something about you? Does it denote what you were taught, or
what you learned (and remember)? If the term applies to what
you now know and can do, you could be poorly educated despite
having received a top-notch education. However, if the term
refers to the quality of your schooling, then we’d have to
conclude that a lot of “well-educated” people sat through

lessons that barely registered, or at least are hazy to the point of
irrelevance a few years later.
3. An Absence of Consensus: Is it even possible to agree on a
single definition of what every high school student should know
or be able to do in order to be considered well-educated? Is
such a definition expected to remain invariant across cultures
(with a single standard for the U.S. and Somalia, for example),
or even across subcultures (South-Central Los Angeles and
Scarsdale; a Louisiana fishing community, the upper East side
of Manhattan, and Pennsylvania Dutch country)? How about
across historical eras: would anyone seriously argue that our
criteria for “well-educated” today are exactly the same as those
used a century ago – or that they should be?
To cast a skeptical eye on such claims is not necessarily to
suggest that the term is purely relativistic: you like vanilla, I
like chocolate; you favor knowledge about poetry, I prefer
familiarity with the Gettysburg Address. Some criteria are more
defensible than others. Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge a
striking absence of consensus about what the term ought to
mean. Furthermore, any consensus that does develop is
ineluctably rooted in time and place. It is misleading and even
dangerous to justify our own pedagogical values by pretending
they are grounded in some objective, transcendent Truth, as
though the quality of being well-educated is a Platonic form
waiting to be discovered.
4. Some Poor Definitions: Should we instead try to stipulate
which answers don’t make sense? I’d argue that certain
attributes are either insufficient (possessing them isn’t enough
to make one well-educated) or unnecessary (one can be well-
educated without possessing them) -- or both. Let us therefore
consider ruling out:
Seat time. Merely sitting in classrooms for x hours doesn’t

make one well-educated.
Job skills. It would be a mistake to reduce schooling to
vocational preparation, if only because we can easily imagine
graduates who are well-prepared for the workplace (or at least
for some workplaces) but whom we would not regard as well-
educated. In any case, pressure to redesign secondary education
so as to suit the demands of employers reflects little more than
the financial interests -- and the political power -- of these
corporations.
Test scores. To a disconcerting extent, high scores on
standardized tests signify a facility with taking standardized
tests. Most teachers can instantly name students who are
talented thinkers but who just don’t do well on these exams – as
well as students whose scores seem to overestimate their
intellectual gifts. Indeed, researchers have found a statistically
significant correlation between high scores on a range of
standardized tests and a shallow approach to learning. In any
case, no single test is sufficiently valid, reliable, or meaningful
that it can be treated as a marker for academic success.
Memorization of a bunch o’ facts. Familiarity with a list of
words, names, books, and ideas is a uniquely poor way to judge
who is well-educated. As the philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead observed long ago, “A merely well-informed man is
the most useless bore on God’s earth. . . . Scraps of
information” are only worth something if they are put to use, or
at least “thrown into fresh combinations.”
Look more carefully at the superficially plausible claim that you
must be familiar with, say, King Lear in order to be considered
well-educated. To be sure, it’s a classic meditation on mortality,
greed, belated understanding, and other important themes. But
how familiar with it must you be? Is it enough that you can
name its author, or that you know it’s a play? Do you have to be

able to recite the basic plot? What if you read it once but barely
remember it now?
If you don’t like that example, pick another one. How much do
you have to know about neutrinos, or the Boxer rebellion, or the
side-angle-side theorem? If deep understanding is required, then
(a) very few people could be considered well-educated (which
raises serious doubts about the reasonableness of such a
definition), and (b) the number of items about which anyone
could have that level of knowledge is sharply limited because
time is finite. On the other hand, how can we justify a cocktail-
party level of familiarity with all these items – reminiscent of
Woody Allen’s summary of War and Peace after taking a speed-
reading course: “It’s about Russia.” What sense does it make to
say that one person is well-educated for having a single
sentence’s worth of knowledge about the Progressive Era or
photosynthesis, while someone who has to look it up is not?
Knowing a lot of stuff may seem harmless, albeit insufficient,
but the problem is that efforts to shape schooling around this
goal, dressed up with pretentious labels like “cultural literacy,”
have the effect of taking time away from more meaningful
objectives, such as knowing how to think. If the Bunch o’ Facts
model proves a poor foundation on which to decide who is
properly educated, it makes no sense to peel off items from such
a list and assign clusters of them to students at each grade level.
It is as poor a basis for designing curriculum as it is for judging
the success of schooling.
The number of people who do, in fact, confuse the possession of
a storehouse of knowledge with being “smart” – the latter being
a disconcertingly common designation for those who fare well
on quiz shows -- is testament to the naïve appeal that such a
model holds. But there are also political implications to be
considered here. To emphasize the importance of absorbing a
pile of information is to support a larger worldview that sees

the primary purpose of education as reproducing our current
culture. It is probably not a coincidence that a Core Knowledge
model wins rave reviews from Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum
(and other conservative Christian groups) as well as from the
likes of Investor’s Business Daily. To be sure, not every
individual who favors this approach is a right-winger, but
defining the notion of educational mastery in terms of the
number of facts one can recall is well-suited to the task of
preserving the status quo. By contrast, consider Dewey’s
suggestion that an educated person is one who has “gained the
power of reflective attention, the power to hold problems,
questions, before the mind.” Without this capability, he added,
“the mind remains at the mercy of custom and external
suggestions.”
5. Mandating a Single Definition:Who gets to decide what it
means to be well-educated? Even assuming that you and I agree
to include one criterion and exclude another, that doesn’t mean
our definition should be imposed with the force of law – taking
the form, for example, of requirements for a high school
diploma. There are other considerations, such as the real
suffering imposed on individuals who aren’t permitted to
graduate from high school, the egregious disparities in
resources and opportunities available in different
neighborhoods, and so on.
More to the point, the fact that so many of us don’t agree
suggests that a national (or, better yet, international)
conversation should continue, that one definition may never fit
all, and, therefore, that we should leave it up to local
communities to decide who gets to graduate. But that is not
what has happened. In about half the states, people sitting atop
Mount Olympus have decreed that anyone who doesn’t pass a
certain standardized test will be denied a diploma and, by
implication, classified as inadequately educated. This example
of accountability gone haywire violates not only common sense

but the consensus of educational measurement specialists. And
the consequences are entirely predictable: no high school
graduation for a disproportionate number of students of color,
from low-income neighborhoods, with learning disabilities,
attending vocational schools, or not yet fluent in English.
Less obviously, the idea of making diplomas contingent on
passing an exam answers by default the question of what it
means to be well- (or sufficiently) educated: Rather than
grappling with the messy issues involved, we simply declare
that standardized tests will tell us the answer. This is disturbing
not merely because of the inherent limits of the tests, but also
because teaching becomes distorted when passing those tests
becomes the paramount goal. Students arguably receive an
inferior education when pressure is applied to raise their test
scores, which means that high school exit exams may actually
lower standards.
Beyond proclaiming “Pass this standardized test or you don’t
graduate,” most states now issue long lists of curriculum
standards, containing hundreds of facts, skills, and subskills
that all students are expected to master at a given grade level
and for a given subject. These standards are not guidelines but
mandates (to which teachers are supposed to “align” their
instruction). In effect, a Core Knowledge model, with its
implication of students as interchangeable receptacles into
which knowledge is poured, has become the law of the land in
many places. Surely even defenders of this approach can
appreciate the difference between arguing in its behalf and
requiring that every school adopt it.
6. The Good School: Finally, instead of asking what it means to
be well-educated, perhaps we should inquire into the qualities
of a school likely to offer a good education. I’ve offered my
own answer to that question at book length, as have other
contributors to this issue. As I see it, the best sort of schooling

is organized around problems, projects, and questions – as
opposed to facts, skills, and disciplines. Knowledge is acquired,
of course, but in a context and for a purpose. The emphasis is
not only on depth rather than breadth, but also on discovering
ideas rather than on covering a prescribed curriculum. Teachers
are generalists first and specialists (in a given subject matter)
second; they commonly collaborate to offer interdisciplinary
courses that students play an active role in designing. All of this
happens in small, democratic schools that are experienced as
caring communities.
Notwithstanding the claims of traditionalists eager to offer –
and then dismiss -- a touchy-feely caricature of progressive
education, a substantial body of evidence exists to support the
effectiveness of each of these components as well as the
benefits of using them in combination. By contrast, it isn’t easy
to find any data to justify the traditional (and still dominant)
model of secondary education: large schools, short classes, huge
student loads for each teacher, a fact-transmission kind of
instruction that is the very antithesis of “student-centered,” the
virtual absence of any attempt to integrate diverse areas of
study, the rating and ranking of students, and so on. Such a
system acts as a powerful obstacle to good teaching, and it
thwarts the best efforts of many talented educators on a daily
basis.
Low-quality instruction can be assessed with low-quality tests,
including homegrown quizzes and standardized exams designed
to measure (with faux objectivity) the number of facts and skills
crammed into short-term memory. The effects of high-quality
instruction are trickier, but not impossible, to assess. The most
promising model turns on the notion of “exhibitions” of
learning, in which students reveal their understanding by means
of in-depth projects, portfolios of assignments, and other
demonstrations – a model pioneered by Ted Sizer, Deborah
Meier, and others affiliated with the Coalition of Essential

Schools. By now we’re fortunate to have access not only to
essays about how this might be done (such as Sizer’s invaluable
Horace series) but to books about schools that are actually
doing it: The Power of Their Ideas by Meier, about Central Park
East Secondary School in New York City; Rethinking High
School by Harvey Daniels and his colleagues, about Best
Practice High School in Chicago; and One Kid at a Time by
Eliot Levine, about the Met in Providence, RI.
The assessments in such schools are based on meaningful
standards of excellence, standards that may collectively offer
the best answer to our original question simply because to meet
those criteria is as good a way as any to show that one is well-
educated. The Met School focuses on social reasoning,
empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning, communication,
and personal qualities (such as responsibility, capacity for
leadership, and self-awareness). Meier has emphasized the
importance of developing five “habits of mind”: the value of
raising questions about evidence (“How do we know what we
know?”), point of view (“Whose perspective does this
represent?”), connections (“How is this related to that?”),
supposition (“How might things have been otherwise?”), and
relevance (“Why is this important?”).
It’s not only the ability to raise and answer those questions that
matters, though, but also the disposition to do so. For that
matter, any set of intellectual objectives, any description of
what it means to think deeply and critically, should be
accompanied by a reference to one’s interest or intrinsic
motivation to do such thinking. Dewey reminded us that the
goal of education is more education. To be well-educated, then,
is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that
learning never ends.

ENGL 101
Essay 1: Narrative Argument about Education
Instructions
In Module/Week 3, you will write an approximately 1000-word
(3–4-page) narrative essay in response to the following prompt:
Use a personal narrative to state your views in response to one
of the assigned readings on education.
Be sure to follow the Writing Processes guidelines: gather all of
your information, plan the direction of your essay, and organize
your ideas by developing a 1-page thesis statement and outline
for your essay. Format the thesis statement and the outline in a
single Word document using current MLA, APA, or Turabian
style (whichever corresponds to your degree program). Submit
this thesis and outline by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Monday of
Module/Week 2 for instructor feedback.
As you compose your essay, be sure to:
· Follow the appropriate formatting style for your degree
program (MLA, APA, or Turabian).
· Use signal phrases and proper in-text citations, and make sure
you include a References or Works Cited page.
· Use the Grading Rubric, Thesis/Outline suggestions from your
instructor, and Proofreading Checklist (provided below) to draft
and revise your essay.
· Include your thesis statement and outline on a separate page at
the end of the document.
· Type your degree program and which style of writing you are
using (MLA, APA, or Turabian) on the the title page of your
essay and in the “Submission Title” field of the SafeAssign link
in the module/week so that your instructor can grade your essay
accordingly.

You may use one or more of the authors from the readings in
the course up to this point. Be sure to fully cite all quotations,
summaries, and paraphrases used within your essay, or those
excerpts will be regarded as plagiarism and result in a “0” on
your essay and possibly course failure.
Please Note: This assignment must be submitted by 11:59 p.m.
(ET) on Monday of Module/Week 3 and must include a title
page, essay itself, a works cited/references page of any primary
or secondary texts cited in the essay, followed by the
thesis/outline page.
Proofreading Checklist
Part 1:
Read through your paper and check the appropriate boxes on the
chart below. If any area of your paper needs revision, make sure
you correct it before submitting your essay. One of the best
ways to proofread your writing is to read it backward to
forward, sentence-by-sentence. This helps you to see words and
ideas you may have missed. Another very successful tool for
proofreading is to read your work out loud to someone else.
Students often think that handing their paper to someone and
asking them to read it is the same thing, but it isn’t. Instead, ask
them to listen while you read your own words. You will
immediately hear what you missed or want to improve in your
writing.
Feature
(Instruction from Lessons 1-8)
Successful
Needs Revision
x
1. Clearly shows my opinion

2. Tells a story that reflects my opinion
3. Contains pathos (emotional) appeals
4. Contains ethos (values/belief) appeals
5. Contains logos (factual) appeals
6. Title reflects my issue and opinion
7. Contains appropriate header for my discipline (MLA, APA,
Turabian)
8. If using APA, contains properly formatted title and abstract
pages
9. Double-spaced
10. Margins are 1 inch wide on all sides
11. Font is New Times Roman, 12 pt.
12. References/Works Cited page includes all sources used for
this essay

13. Spellchecked
Part 2:
When you are satisfied with the quality of your essay, post it to
Blackboard via the SafeAssign link for grading. Do not forget to
write your degree program and whether you are using MLA,
APA, or Turabian on the Title Page and in the “Submission
Title” field when submitting your paper.
Page 1 of 2
Essay 1: Narrative Argument Rubric
Essential Requirements for grading:
1. The Essay has been submitted to safeassign
2. The essay addresses the writing Prompt
3. The Essay Follows Assignment Instructions (-5pts Deduction
for Not Following Instructions)
Student: Date:
CONTENT
Good/Excellent (45-39)
Fair/Competent (38-31)
Deficient (30-0)
Development
(CCLO # 2)
/45pts
· Major points are stated clearly and are well-supported
· Content is persuasive and comprehensive
· Content and purpose of the writing is clear
· Thesis has a strong claim. The audience is clear and

appropriate for the topic
· Supportive information (if required) is strong and addresses
writing focus
· Major points are addressed but clarity or support is limited
· Content is somewhat persuasive or comprehensive
· Content is inconsistent (lack of clear purpose and /or clarity)
· Thesis could be stronger
· Supportive information (if required) needs strengthening or
does not address writing concepts
· Major points are unclear and/or insufficiently supported
· Content is missing essentials
· Content has unsatisfactory purpose, focus, and clarity
· Supportive information (if required) is missing
Organization and Structure
(CCLO #1)
/45pts
· Writing is well-structured, clear, and easy to follow
· Introduction compelling forecasts the topic and thesis
· Each paragraph is unified and has a clear central idea
· Transitional wording is present throughout the writing
· Conclusion is a logical end to the writing
· Adequately organized with some areas difficult to follow
· Introduction needs to provide a stronger gateway into the
writing
· Some paragraphs lack unity
· Better transitions are needed to provide fluency of ideas
· Conclusion is trite or barely serves its purpose
· Organization and structure detract from the writer’s message
· Introduction and/or conclusion is incomplete or missing
· Paragraphs are not unified (more than one topic / missing or
inadequate controlling and concluding sentences)
· Transitions are missing
· Conclusion, if present, fails to serve its purpose

MECHANICS
Good/Excellent
Fair/Competent
Deficient
Grammar and Diction
(CCLO # 1, 3)
/45pts
· The writing reflects grammatical, punctuation, and spelling
standards
· Language is accurate, appropriate, and effective
· Writing’s tone is appropriate and highly effective
· The writing contains some grammatical, punctuation, and/or
spelling errors
· Language is unclear, awkward or inappropriate in parts
· The writing’s tone is generally appropriate and moderately
effective
· The writing contains many grammatical, punctuation and/or
spelling errors
· Language use is largely inaccurate or inappropriate
· The writing’s tone is ineffective and/or inappropriate
FORM
Good/Excellent (15-11)
Fair/Competent (10-5)
Deficient (4-0)
Format:
MLA/APA/Turabian Paper
Requirements
(CCLO #6)

/15pts
· Writing correctly follows formatting guidelines
· Parenthetical and bibliographical source citations are used
correctly and appropriately
· Writing follows most formatting guidelines, but some flaws
are detected
· Parenthetical and bibliographical source citations are
incorrectly formatted or used
· Writing lacks many elements of correct formatting
· Parenthetical and bibliographical source citations and/or
references are not provided
Total
Assessment
Development
( CCLO # 2)
Organization and Structure
(CCLO # 1)
Grammar and Diction
(CCLO #1,3)
Format : MLA/APA/Turabian Paper Requirements
(CCLO # 6)
Total Points
___ / 45
____/ 45
____ /45
_____ / 15
______/ 150

Grade Scale
A
B
C
D
F
A= 150-135
B= 134-120
C = 119-105
D = 104-90
F = 89-0
Instructor’s Comments:
ENGL 101
Essay 1: Narrative Argument about Education
Instructions
In Module/Week 3, you will write an approximately 1000-word
(3–4-page) narrative essay in response to the following prompt:
Use a personal narrative to state your views in response to one
of the assigned readings on education.
Be sure to follow the Writing Processes guidelines: gather all of
your information, plan the direction of your essay, and organize
your ideas by developing a 1-page thesis statement and outline
for your essay. Format the thesis statement and the outline in a
single Word document using current MLA, APA, or Turabian
style (whichever corresponds to your degree program). Submit
this thesis and outline by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Monday of
Module/Week 2 for instructor feedback.
As you compose your essay, be sure to:

· Follow the appropriate formatting style for your degree
program (MLA, APA, or Turabian).
· Use signal phrases and proper in-text citations, and make sure
you include a References or Works Cited page.
· Use the Grading Rubric, Thesis/Outline suggestions from your
instructor, and Proofreading Checklist (provided below) to draft
and revise your essay.
· Include your thesis statement and outline on a separate page at
the end of the document.
· Type your degree program and which style of writing you are
using (MLA, APA, or Turabian) on the the title page of your
essay and in the “Submission Title” field of the SafeAssign link
in the module/week so that your instructor can grade your essay
accordingly.
You may use one or more of the authors from the readings in
the course up to this point. Be sure to fully cite all quotations,
summaries, and paraphrases used within your essay, or those
excerpts will be regarded as plagiarism and result in a “0” on
your essay and possibly course failure.
Please Note: This assignment must be submitted by 11:59 p.m.
(ET) on Monday of Module/Week 3 and must include a title
page, essay itself, a works cited/references page of any primary
or secondary texts cited in the essay, followed by the
thesis/outline page.
Proofreading Checklist
Part 1:
Read through your paper and check the appropriate boxes on the
chart below. If any area of your paper needs revision, make sure
you correct it before submitting your essay. One of the best
ways to proofread your writing is to read it backward to
forward, sentence-by-sentence. This helps you to see words and
ideas you may have missed. Another very successful tool for

proofreading is to read your work out loud to someone else.
Students often think that handing their paper to someone and
asking them to read it is the same thing, but it isn’t. Instead, ask
them to listen while you read your own words. You will
immediately hear what you missed or want to improve in your
writing.
Feature
(Instruction from Lessons 1-8)
Successful
Needs Revision
x
1. Clearly shows my opinion
2. Tells a story that reflects my opinion
3. Contains pathos (emotional) appeals
4. Contains ethos (values/belief) appeals
5. Contains logos (factual) appeals
6. Title reflects my issue and opinion
7. Contains appropriate header for my discipline (MLA, APA,
Turabian)

8. If using APA, contains properly formatted title and abstract
pages
9. Double-spaced
10. Margins are 1 inch wide on all sides
11. Font is New Times Roman, 12 pt.
12. References/Works Cited page includes all sources used for
this essay
13. Spellchecked
Part 2:
When you are satisfied with the quality of your essay, post it to
Blackboard via the SafeAssign link for grading. Do not forget to
write your degree program and whether you are using MLA,
APA, or Turabian on the Title Page and in the “Submission
Title” field when submitting your paper.
Page 1 of 2

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